My phone is ringing. To be clear, my iPhone 12, which I’ve had for six years—or a standard Apple eon—is playing “Uptown Funk,” by Bruno Mars, [my attorney]’s ringtone, which matters since she’s in depositions sun-up to sun-down and it’s hard for me to get face time (ear time) and also I just dropped a couple C-notes on per…

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I’m subscribed to 943 stacks because that way they’ll subscribe back (not so much). I still get all the press releases for whiskey and notebooks and restaurants and desktop accessories from my B2B period so my inbox is forty-eight thousand emails deep in three different verticals and growing. I’m reading academic lit on the phonopoetic theory of affectation in poetry and prose, highlighting every other paragraph until you can see the pages from space. On 17th street in Calgary I saw an eyeglasses company sign that said “let us sit on your face” and thought, I should post that because it will help with engagement. Somewhere about 2/3 of the way through Snowcrash, I highlighted a passage about Sumerian phonetics because it would look good in my dissertation (I’m not working on a phd). Everything I do is run through some kind of pregame filter to see if I can sell it. I’m working on the next novel and it’s good and my research has me time-travelling to 1953 to find out which stereo cabinets a high-falutin’ newspaper columnist would have in their bachelor pad and I’m fucking wrung out and my eyes itch and I’m sick of it all.

I was beginning to accept that I was caught in my own personal beige dystopia, the blahpocalypse, and would spend the rest of my life in an endless loop of liking, commenting, posting, tuning my SEO, and turning every book I read into a ‘scource,’ then I read this:

My attention span is so cooked I can’t get through a 20-minute TV episode without picking up my phone.

But last night, I read 130 pages and never reached for it once.

People are buying focus apps and lockboxes and grayscale screens. The fix is a good book, and it’s been free at the library this whole time.

(italics mine)

That’s from Elle, who writes Elle Reads Library Books, and she’s right. The trick of literature is to possess us fully. A good book pulls us out of our ordinary life, plunging us into some wild adventure where we assume the god-form of the protagonist, pick up out sword, and rush into a melee of steel—all fully realized in 9K and surround sound, while emotions well up and spill over and we live, as hard as we can, another life. A different life. We go, authentically and for reals, somewhere else. Twenty words in and we’re not here anymore. We’re there.

Never have we needed the gift of literature, the willing suspension of disbelief, like we do now. And never has that gift had such potential for restoration. There are a lot of ways to describe what may need restoration, but I’d like to submit this broad brush term: dignity. The rush of desperation I described in the beginning of this essay is a revealing picture of me en flagrante indignus. Like Elle, it has poisoned me all the way down. Even the most enthralling television show finds me glancing at my screen. I have been stolen from myself by myself with the assitance of an illuminated distraction lozenge lodged in the palm of my hand.

But then, then, I open a good book and I am gone. Even if the protagonist raises an iPhone to their face to unlock its screen, it will not lure me into swiping right to open XFaceRedditBookstaGram. Because it’s only part of the enchantment I’ve chosen for the duration of 30 pages. The lozenge can’t reach me there because in the fictive world it doesn’t exist.

Reading is a dignified pursuit. And for a few minutes after I close a book the dignity of reading, the calm from a cognitive reset, follows me as I pack up my things and walk out of a coffee shop. I am infused at three in the morning when I finally click the lamp, infused with refinement. For a couple of hours, I sustained the magical evocation of another world wherein I wore the grizzled mantle of a hero. For a couple of hours, I owned my attention and I owned my time and the amazing thing here, the remarkable thing here, is you know exactly what I mean even though the very idea of owning my time implies I endure time I don’t own which, again, we both know is true and real and deranged.

Apps are vampiric. Our devices assist in our desanguination. Let’s fight back by laying down our addiction to productivity and our collective lozenges of distraction and disappear.

And look, you may be halfway there, teetering on the fence between your app library and an actual library, where the only thing keeping you from snatching a novel off the shelf is your fear of reading the wrong book. Another artifact of the narrowing gaze of social media. There is no wrong book. As long as you are reading a story, the trick of literature works.

Go ahead, read 50 Shades of Grey. That book sold 100 million copies for a reason. Read a Reacher book. Read your cherished dirty little secret book. It doesn’t matter. It’s not about good writing, or apparent literary value. It’s about how thoroughly you disappear.

That’s what we’re trying to do here, that’s what’s valuable here. When you look up from your 43,000 emails and nine million notifications and the glowering visage of the algorithm, when you catc h yourself taking a selfie in ‘brand mode’ and you cringe and you’re wondering how the fuck you can get out of all this…well, this is how.

Read a book. Disappear. Tell the algorithm to go fuck itself and die.

Do here’s the skinny and I want to address the new ventures right up front. You may have noticed a spastic video at the top of this post screaming EATING VINCENT PRICE in audio all-caps and proclaiming (rightly) that every great dinner starts with a madman holding a knife. The images in that video are from A Treasury of Great Recipes, a rare and legendary cookbook authored by Mary Price and her husband, the iconic horror actor, star of radio, television, and the stage, voice of the narrator in Thriller, and Edward Scissorhand’s dad, Vincent Price.

Turns out he could cook.

He was, in fact, one of America’s original celebrity gourmands, a notorious and endlessly curious foodie who dined at the best restaurants across North America and Europe, charming recipes from the grease-burned fingers of world-class chefs. All of which he collected in the Treasury.

And you are right, I’ve been here before. In 2011 I worked with Lauren Parton and some others running series of pop-up dinners at secret locations (abandoned convent, abandoned storefront, completely occupied luxury high-rise apartment, the Keith Mansion) for 30 to 60 wildly enthusiastic diners. I loved it, but, like work got in the way and yadda yadda yadda, blah blah blah.

So I have uttered the words: I’m back before. However, things are different now. EVP returns to the original concept: a blog wherein I cook my way through the venerable cookbook, failing all the way, and offering up tasty recipes from 1964.

This time, however, it’s not a side gig. As of this moment, Eating Vincent Price is my job. Join me over here.

However

I have obligations and relationships in the marketing and publishing industry relying on me to furnish them with bad ass written content that pushes visits and keeps readers on the page (Hi, Joan). But my old company, Creative Writer PRO, sounded so 2010. I’ve renamed it and reframed it to Narrative Reprise, where I’ll be offering that same badass content with a focus on senior executive biographies for outplacement consultancies and in-house comms at F-400 companies.

However, however

I’m a writer with one foot planted on the cold concrete of business journalism while the other one’s sinking into the warm and writhing loam of literature.

I continue to write novels (dig my WIP), short stories (did you read this one?) and have developed a traditional poetry practice of composing sonnets and villanelles in my head and speaking them aloud while I’m doing dishes and feeding the cat and driving around Chicago and most of all while sitting on my front porch like some goddam weirdo. More on that later.

In all of this

I continue to remain devoted to my purpose, in all endeavors, even the funny ones.

Whattaya think?

There’s this moment in Shrinking when Paul is holding a newborn and he looks into its face and it looks back. I want to talk about that look. I want to put a couch in that look and lay down on it and curl up and nap. I want to understand that look because when Paul gazed down at that beautiful child he was also beautiful, and I burst out crying and I’m not entirely certain why, but I think it’s because Paul is played by Harrison Ford.

He’s so old. He’s so old and I knew he was old and hell, I know exactly how old he is, and I’ve watched his face soften and crumple and heard his voice gain a shovel full of gravel in it, but I wasn’t prepared. I wasn’t prepared. Harrison Ford is getting old and so am I.

This kind of essay is so dumb.

People age, it’s the byproduct of living. It’s not exactly cutting edge to recognize that. But as I wiped the tears off my cheeks I was surprised; I felt like I was breaking new ground, personally, for me, in my life to have this sudden and surprising grasp on my mortality hit me with such emotion and then it got dumber because I was crying about something that isn’t even real. I was sad about television.

And look, I may be writing about the oldest self-realization known, quotidian as “death and taxes,” but being a cliché didn’t hold back how it walloped me. Each of us comes to this realization in our own way, a way that is exactly the same for everyone. We cross some interior threshold as we blow out the candle on a birthday cake and it takes two breaths and we grin for the selfies but inside we’re thinking, oh fuck, I’m older than my dad.

And let’s be real, Ford is everybody’s dad.

We all love him. Some of us have loved him since 1977, though to be realer, Han Solo can’t hold a candle to Indiana Jones so while I was attracted to him in ‘77, I didn’t fall in love until ‘81. The fact is, we’re TV people. We might be the most TV people of all, the last fully cathode generation and the people we grew up with on the tube are very, very real to us. They aren’t just actors or characters. They’re family.

Which is fucked up because no they are not. They are strangers. In life. But when broadcast, they are something else, something beyond mere celebrity. They’re comfort ghosts. Shades of contentedness. And look, not all of them. Not every actor can transmogrify themselves into symbol territory. It takes a special quality. Tom Hanks has it in spades. Jimmy Stewart came pretty close. But I don’t think I’d feel this strongly if it was Jim Varney looking at that kid.

I used to be one of those people who didn’t own a TV.

Smug. Judgy. But I caved and I’m glad I did because as much as I understand simulacrum theory and can enumerate the many layers of simulation we’re woven through, I am completely OK with anchoring a certain freight of emotion in the unreal world. And maybe it’s a specious argument anyway; Baudrillard would’ve binge watched Widow’s Bay then turned around and given a damn strong argument about why it was fine, just fine. I can’t be quite as cogent as our dead French friend, but I will argue this point: TV is as real as anything else; it’s a perfectly legit method of imparting a story; it moves us, it defines us, which is important because we maybe sometimes associate the safety and comfort of family into the digital ghosts that populate our streams.

It might just be that we see them so much.

I probably see Ford more than I see my mom, because she lives in Alabama and he lives on my Sony flatscreen. Might just be that all the snooty arguments about the validity of TV add up to exactly squat and the resonance of deep, abiding beauty broadcast into my living room is as real as a Monet. It certainly feels real. William Storr and Steven Pinker and a slew of other well credentialed thinkers would agree that it doesn’t matter how you get your story, what matters is that when you receive a story, you disappear.

This is the great gift of storytelling. Which is what good acting is. Ford’s face in that moment when he beheld that tiny child was a dictionary of emotion. The long story of his life unfolded from his own birth until exactly then and I felt it but here’s the thing: this essay isn’t about growing old.

It’s not even about Harrison Ford.

When I was a kid, we used to go to Wekiva Springs, a wide shallow pool of water with a spring that was a whole school bus deep. Eight years old, I crept to the edge of that cavern carrying a huge heavy rock then, after staring into all thirty feet, I’d step off and, holding onto that rock like it was my life, plunge.

Wekiva spews 400 thousand gallons of water an hour up and out of its rocky throat, up past my feet, so the descent was maybe slightly slower than it should be, more like floating than plunging, and the air in my lungs by the time my toes dug into the bottom sand, would’ve turned to fire. Then, with all my strength, I’d turn to look into the true spring, the dark well of the cave from which all those thousands of gallons flowed and I’d stare. Lungs on fire. Heart running like a Mercury

into a blue darker than any black.

The rocks, brown and gold and tufted with green weeds, faded from the edges of its mouth into tombstone then nothing and though I knew I would be ok, I was terrified. Not by the dark. The sun made it all the way down to the bottom where I stood. I was bathed in turquoise. And not the water, it was, after all, trying its best to pop me up into the air like a champagne cork. It was the sheer life of it. The sheer volume of life.

The water, cold and pure, pushed out through Florida’s aquifer, fed an entire river, fed alligators and small mouth bass and bluegill and raccoons and the enormous strangely elegant alligator turtles that would glide like great silent battleships under your canoe; it fed all the trees, all the ferns, the infinite menagerie of tiny creatures and it had been doing it for a million years.

As I burned at the bottom of that well, I stared into a harrowing eternity, and it was eerie, and it was exhilarating.

In our long, short lives we may have the great opportunity to fall into an instant. We may have the remarkable fortune to be blessed by a burgeoning appreciation that we’re only an instant of an instance in a well of love so vast, so eternal, it dwarfs the stars reflected in its surface. We may realize with surety and annihilation that no matter how many decades have worn away beneath us, compared to love, we’re still innocent children, still just a boy at the bottom of a spring, holding a rock, trying to comprehend the incomprehensible.

We may, if we are good people, if we try, apprehend in the gaze of an infant the overwhelming grace of being alive. And if that happens during a TV show that’s just fine. That’s just fine.

Artificial Intelligence apps like ChatGPT and Claude are influencing young writers in the worst way. They offer something for nothing, or so it seems. A few deft words poured into a prompt and poof you’ve got a romance novel set in the Cotswolds in 1454. And it’s…pretty good. It seems pretty good. All the right words are in the right place as far as you can tell. You can go ahead and self-publish it and who knows, maybe you can make a buck. Probably not.

Those prompters who do this, proud as they may be, are giving up the best and the worst gift writing gives to its practitioners: struggle and doubt. Struggle is vital for any artist. For authors, it’s the compost heap of failed novels, awful sentences, grammar. Mistakes. And just plain old bad writing, the stuff you have to get out of the way, that you must suffer on your long road to fluency.

All of which is a necessary rant, a preamble to the following: AI has some legitimate uses in the creative process for writers, and even ancient luddites like myself may benefit from a carefully chaperoned relationship with Claude.

Pet Word Count

While revising my most recent novel, I noticed I’d used ‘snarl’ too much. I figured, maybe five instances in 80,000 words. I was wrong. I’d used ‘snarl’ 57 times. Fifty-seven. That’s too many snarls. I wondered what other words had infected my book. I could use the frequency function in Word, or I could use Find/Replace. But I’d have to know what word I was looking for and the frequency report is janky at best. I turned to Claude.

I fed it my manuscript, then asked it to find pet words and boy did it ever. Just: 92 times; Turns, 87; deep/deeply 62…

What did this word frequency mean? Ninety-two instances of ‘just’ is barely .12%, barely one-tenth of one percent of my total word count. Surely the reader won’t notice that and no, probably not. They’ll be too caught up in the magnificence of my prose to realize they’re seeing it every 870 words. But an editor? She will just throw that manuscript across the room.

Overusing a word is bad writing. It means that word and perhaps the phrase it’s part of have become a tic, a pet word—filler. It usually means the sentence a pet word is crammed into is not strong enough to support its idea. This means each instance is an opportunity to tighten up your manuscript by addressing a problem that may be invisible. Like in this example:

CAN YOU SPOT THE

THE MISTAKE IN THIS

SENTENCE?

All writers have crutch words. Making yourself aware of them makes you a better writer. Makes your stories stronger. Gets you closer to a sale. But the use of pet words is only one of the invisible habits that can weaken any author’s work. For those of us who don’t (yet) have an editor who champions our efforts, we have to rely on our ability to spot our terrible writing and it’s almost impossible.

Timeline Troubles

I am a recent convert to planning my novels. But even with my careful attention to crafting a plot and developing characters, I couldn’t stay in my lane when it came to keeping a calendar of the story. Claude read the work, then drafted a report which located and ranked timeline errors and explained why they were wrong. It also offered a fix, but I deleted that column as it came way too close to writing (the illustration keeps that column so you can see it).

I’m not sure I’ll need that tool again, as the revision was so painful I will be acutely aware of the timeline of every story I write going forward. But the manuscript I’m shopping now was all over the place. The story bounced back and forth across the present. Back 600 years. Back only a week. Back only two days. There’s a ticking bomb that’s eight days long, but I had somehow written scenes that dragged the resolution out to eleven just by not paying attention to my own employment of time.

Claude walked me through that revision and though I felt a little like I was cheating, I got over it pretty quick when AI caught a very subtle error wherein I’d started something on a Wednesday but implied, in the subsequent prose, that it ended on the Tuesday prior. That’s fine for a book about time travel, but my book is about gargoyles, and it just didn’t work. After the fix, the chapter was a much better read, which showed me how even an invisible mistake can be picked up by our subconscious and make us crazy.

This Story is So Tense

Finally, my author’s kryptonite: tense agreement and continuity of pov. I can change tense in a single sentence and never notice. I’ll read it fifteen times during revision and not notice I start in Third Person Omniscient, pop out to First Person Plural, then come back to what I think is Third Person Omniscient but is actually Third Person Limited. It nags at my BETA readers and infuriates me, but I can’t fix it. I am POV-challenged. I am tense, man. So tense.

But Claude can see it as is evidenced by the report I received, which was fifteen pages long. It took me two days of work, but I fixed every instance where I’d juggled tenses and every section with multiple-pov-syndrome.

Conclusion

Some problems we have should not be addressed by A.I. Scene analysis is a critical part of revision and I have no doubt Claude would write a perfect report showing you where your scenes were missing a goal, a conflict, or a resolution. You could program it to do a HIP check (hook, inciting incident, propulsion into the next scene). But this kind of revision is part of the creative process. You should not leave that to Claude because Claude might make changes to your plot, to your scenes, and even to your characters which you would never consider. That is different from finding mechanical mistakes and logical mistakes. The uses I’ve outlined above are not much different from using spellcheck.

You could use Claude to check on head hopping (I did this for the sake of this article, was mortified, and deleted the report. Hopefully I’ll just forget about it. HOPEFULLY). You could have Claude check for ghost narration, do a voice register audit, a chapter hook audit, pacing and scene length, duplicate passage scan (a terrible sin I commit often during revision) and (since my novel occurs in 1275 and 1876), an anachronism report.

Each of these reports are part of an author’s creative process. They lead directly to rewrites and may inadvertently influence your authorship (Claude really, really tries to be helpful. If it gives you a suggested rewrite, it is very, very hard to forget you read it). They are risky to your integrity and to the inevitable question from an agent, “was any part of this manuscript created using A.I.?”

Sometimes writing seems impossible. We are isolated, nobody understands what we actually do, and we spend a lot of time staring. We could at least get a little help from a robot assistant. A.I. can help and you can do it without compromising your integrity as a creator as long as you set boundaries and don’t let yourself to be tempted by the hallucination that Claude is a genie.

I’ve finished another novel and I’m shopping for agents. This means I’m in what I call “rejection bingo,” the dispiriting period of climbing my way up the statistical ladder of “its just not a good fit” to “CALL ME NOW!” Pretty sure this ladder is about a mile high so I’ll be doing this for a while.

In the meantime, if you’d like to preview this thing, then please click on the link below. Here’s the pitch:

A 600-year-old Gargoyle perched on the ramparts of an alchemical cathedral on the fictional island of Stoughleigh by Craig narrates the story of his sacred ward, a 14-year-old, foul-mouthed, wildly intelligent mudlark girl named Whistle. When she discovers a drowned earl in the Thames, Whistle kicks off the exposure of a massive land grab for her island that nearly kills her. When she’s nearly in a noose, Bernard leads an army of gargoyles (and statues, and grotesques) through the streets of Victorian London to save her.

(Also, a harrowing narrow boat trip, a suffragette viscountess, water gypsies, a 12th century alchemist, a vengeful island spirit, and the terror of British sanitary quarantines during the reign of Victoria.)

WE LITHIC CREATURES is an 81,000-word upmarket literary fantasy with strong crossover appeal. If you liked Piranesi, by Susannah Clarke, or Kira Jane Buxton’s Hollow Kingdom, or J.M. Miro’s Ordinary Monsters then you’ll love We Lithic Creatures.

{Think Murderbot Medieval or Anti-Bridgerton, where everyone is filthy, poor, and too busy surviving to care about getting married.}

First three chapters.

I am exceedingly proud of this short story, which is actually an excerpt from a work in progress…please forgive the magazine for their use of AI in editing this piece so some of the song titles are not properly italicized (perfect in the draft I submitted) and for taking the liberty of rewriting my bio is such a way that it is…weirder.

PLEASE CLICK THE LINK THEN READ THIS STORY. PLEASE SHARE THIS STORY.

https://apricitymagazine.com/portfolio/the-last-words-of-copernicus/

I miss my dad. He died twenty-three years ago, one lung down, broke, badgered by creditors and alone in a house on Lost Lake Road, just outside Clermont, Florida. He wasn’t a particularly wise man, no more or less than anyone else. He got along with people when there were people to get along with. He was loved. He was cherished by a handful of sun leathered Floridian plumbers and pipefitters as well as certain curvish members of Parents Without Partners. He smoked himself to death. He loved to golf.

I miss my dad because in an effort to recapture a sense of hope, I’m rewatching The West Wing, and in the ardent sweep of that first season I suddenly realized what’s wrong with America. I don’t know what to do about it. I have no solution. But I know this: we miss our dad.

The America the rest of the world observes, the collective we, is a union comprised of individuals in three camps: there are the people who think we should pull ourselves up exclusively by our own bootstraps, that Government has reached the Big & Tall end of the shirt rack, and that minimum wage has reached its maximum outlay. Then there are the people horrified and infuriated by the incident in Minneapolis, people who think teachers ought to be paid a lot more, people who see right through the Venezuelan commodities grab. Finally, there are the others, the people tying Nazi bands around their sleeves in preparation for marching in some small town, the people who think ICE is an emblem of justice, the people who think of course we should take Greenland. Of course.

The first two camps don’t always get along. Lately, they make Thanksgiving really uncomfortable. But the individuals in these camps often find themselves standing together drinking a cup of coffee, staring at Washington’s most recent display of dumbassery with their collective mouths hanging open. They turn to each other and shake their heads and have a quiet little discussion that doesn’t really go further than the breakroom walls but in that discussion they agree entirely that, as William S. Burroughs wrote, “the crazy people from the crazy place have outbroken,” and are now running the show and the calmer people in both camps are more than a little concerned.

The West Wing is a wonderful balm for our anxiety. It’s no cure. I mean, part of the anxiety is the knowledge that we’re infected and will be sick for a while. But it does offer the satiety all great drama offers, the gift of literature some of us cherish, that we can live, however fictive, however briefly, in a better world. The characters in this show, the mindset they represent, the probity they employ while trying to properly govern the fantasy of democracy from 1999, are the dad I’m talking about. They are grown-ups doing their best to ensure the whole American experiment doesn’t flare up into a conflagration of madness and burn the lab to the ground. It was exciting when it came out. Timely. Soothing. Inspiring. It’s even more so now.

In Episode 19, “Let Bartlett Be Bartlett,” Martin Sheen, as President Jed Bartlett, has his ass handed to him by Leo McGarry (John Spencer) which sends him into a moment of crisis, a moment simmering since the pilot, a moment where the character comes to a boil. He’s been careful, politic, strategic and gotten nowhere. He’s been diplomatic and gotten nowhere. He’s been virtuous and gotten nowhere because, as McGarry yells, he’s been afraid he won’t get re-elected. He’s been a gutless chicken shit.

But Bartlett’s not gutless. Nor is he chicken. He’s merely suffering from the same fear all incumbents suffer, that if he upsets the apple cart, he won’t get re-elected and his party, ostensibly the party of better angels, will lose their tenuous grip on power. At the time, it was neoliberal wish fulfillment that extrapolated the ideals of the Clinton administration—and I do mean the ideals, I mean the sense of hope delivered by Clinton on his best days. It was a picture of idealism. A fantasy of hope.

Twenty-six years later, The West Wing offers stark criticism of how Washington has lost its way. How the American people have dissembled from a more-or-less cohesive assembly of neighborly opposition into a de facto civil war.

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Click the image, baby. Or click this.

In which I attend to the attention economy, relaying my supreme dissatisfaction while fully immersed in this evil.

Expectations were exceeded by a long chain of country miles. I have grown as a writer. I have crossed a threshold from the known into the unknown and maybe I’m being a tad melodramatic but goddam. I have a year to go. A year of even harder work, even tougher assignments, a year for a portfolio that will define me.

I can’t wait.

Here is the poem I wrote today after racing home so I wouldn’t cry in front of my peers. It’s raw and unedited, emotionally charged and needs to be cleaned up. Kind of like me right now:

The Return

As you roll your suitcase deeper into the terminal
I present to you a bouquet of unknown adjectives
A bourgeoning prosody entwined in our gang tat tattered tabula
look out the window of your bus
Down on the sheepish blanket of England
Look, look out the drivers’ side window, look
At the endless score of fence post wire gate, of stone and stone and stone and
Look, look out the window of the plane, into an
unfathomably beautiful green hole in the ocean
oh, this long day, this long day, this

As you roll over the low hills of Alsace, golden and high
I present to you a garden of brand-new insights, staggering home
Drunk on meaning like the words we shared, we flared, we paired
Over nachos and candleflame, over IPA and cigarettes, over
Paris maybe or snow water lakes, locked under mountaintops,
Over the rock of Gibraltar, over windswept senators’ knees, over
That place where the goddess, moon silvered until she is transparent, ghostly,
Divine, dances with her lion and her owls
Oh, this long day, this long day, this

As you drive through a city we’ve never seen, busy and blind
I present to you a statuary of memory, each one carved by hand, from
Alabaster and coffee cups, from take away and sit right down and how are you, and
All the diamond dusted debris from heart song bursting from our lips as
little dust devil symphonies of laughter, so fierce we cover our eyes, if
you look to your right, look through that open window, past the lace curtain
lifted by your passing, past the tea cup halfway to an old man’s mouth, through
the open door at the back, a world revealed in a passing glance, you will see the
light linens of our songs strung on lines like spirit flags, like
prayers sewn into our hems so our shirtsleeves whisper when we walk
this is where you find the spirit, dear, this is where you discover deity, dear, this is the
thing we are all, we have all, you and me and everyone, is and has and will be looking for
forever, and ever, ah…men, how you forget yourselves, hearken, hark, kin,
this is a prayer for this long day, this long day, this

As I sink into Chicago, a temple swallowed whole by a green river, a thought consumed
By a song, as I worship in my way the names of the saints, the lesser gods of Irving park drive, of Ravenswood, of Ionia and Sioux, as I fall backward onto my bench in the Long Room where I am crushed by the men I love, wrapped in the incense of whiskey and shaving cream as those Champagned women I’ve collected lean against me to bark their bubbly burble I can’t get enough of, I will look, I will glance, I will peer into the corners of the room where the tiniest, rarest angels wait and watch and wink to them as they play me a nickelodeon of still pictures:

you laughing so hard one eye is closed,
and you spitting coffee at a word,
and you with your immutable shirt-worthy wit,
and you chased by cherubim (all they want to do is braid your hair, they are the mute, innocent children of memory) a fountain of fabula,
and you, a glorious threnody of saxophones and horns eyes squinted into a joyous
blindness,
and you crying at the table,
and you tattooed with vines and Loreleis,
and you burnt by a bladderwort to chortle your breath until it can’t carry water,
and you, hair on fire with a flame ignited by a movie made by ghosts that tells the
story of the end of the world of the exodus of the kitchen gods by wagon wheel
into sepia, of the exultations of an exhausted God, goddam this long day, this long day, this

As we all return, passing through the tiniest belly of the smallest whale, as we are
boosted up by threshold guardians in imposter drag—turns out they were in
disguise—as we ignite our flights, dragonborn, winded, beaten into new shapes,
as we come home inebriated by the very finest, the very oldest elixir sipped from
the same communion in that cathedral we all belong to now, each of us an
explosion of cut glass in every color of a dictionary, we bring home with us a howl
that heals, a memory of golden spires in a sky the blue of a gypsy pony’s
cornflower eye, ruined by new worlds, wrecked by exercise that stretched our
hearts across all five continents on this day,
this long day.

--30--

Tomorrow I get on a plane, and I won’t be back until late August. I’ve been looking forward to this trip for nearly two years. It’s a disjointed trip, with a few days spent in San Francisco for my goddaughter’s wedding, then I’m back in Chicago, literally for less than a day, then I’m in the air again to go to Oxford where I will spend a very busy two weeks in class.

You may not be surprised to hear that I am over the moon about this. That I am in love with the whole thing, the scholarship, the camaraderie of my cohort, the level of amazing achieved by my tutors. Over the moon. I wasn’t sure what I was going to learn while earning this diploma. Sure, creative writing stuff, of course. I knew this course would help me improve my writing by, I assume, teaching me new ways to do the job at a new level but I wasn’t expecting to be kicked in the ass with such power and precision and I certainly wasn’t expecting to yearn for greatness.

Jesus what a sentence. It smacks me in the balls just reading it. Look at it up there at the end of that paragraph, like it’s better than me. And look at the previous sentence; in fact, examine the entirety of the third graph and you will find, buried in its tone, an older version of me I am trying, desperately, to strangle. Shouldn’t be hard. It’s old and weak; it’s bones are as brittle as dried spaghetti. Immediately after saying something important, something revealing, I make a joke. I take it back.

I hate this version of me, I hate how it endures, like a zombie. I have discarded this self. Crawled out of it to get bigger, like a crab. But instead of disappearing, it follows me around. It is always right there behind me, close enough to breathe down my neck. I can feel it, shuffling in my footsteps. And every once in a while, if I’m not on my guard, that dying ghost self steps all the way into my shoes and does all the talking and there I am again, not taking things seriously.

There is value in it. There’s value in not taking the world too seriously, in not taking yourself too seriously. It keeps you light on your toes. Humble. But humility isn’t the same as self-deprecation. That’s a symptom of a deep injury that needs, very much, to be healed.

So, when I write that I didn’t expect to yearn for greatness, what I mean to say is that my aim has shifted. I don’t so much yearn, as seek greatness. Not in the sense of being recognized and lauded. Being recognized is cool. Looks good on a resume. But it doesn’t do a fucking thing for your work. You can’t aim for that. You can’t aim low. You can’t write to impress people. And I have. It was easy because I’m good at it. I’ve surfed that talent with an agility, an adroitness that exists nowhere else in my life. I’ve gotten used to writing well enough to impress people and that has become my bullseye. I hit it every single time. I’m good. I’m very, very good.

Not great.

I had a meeting with a tutor, a poet, a man who spends his days with his mind suffused by meter and verse, by vision and grace, Edward Clarke. I was unsatisfied with the mark he’d given me. I thought he’d misunderstood a reference that was distinctly American and so I came into the meeting after sending an email laying out my argument explicitly.

The first thing he said was, “I won’t be changing your grade.” Then he went on to compliment every word in every poem I’d turned in, showed me how he most certainly understood the references and generally abraded my disappointment until I began to descend into a rare depth of embarrassment. Clarke said I shouldn’t be embarrassed, but I should also understand that the grade I received was exceptional, indicating honors. He enjoyed my poems. They were compelling. Great stuff. Then he ruined me.

One of my poems was a sestina, a rigid, formal style with rules and patterns which must be followed. They are, along with the villanelle, the hardest form of poetry and not many are written. I spent days on this thing. It worked. It meant something. It was technically flawless. Event the envoi, the three line tercet upon which the entire poem rests, was good.

Not great.

Clarke said: “The grade you received is a sign of respect. Your work is compelling, You have something. They’re good. But I don’t want your poems to be good. Don’t strive to be good. Strive to make your poetry last long after you’re gone; make your poems inevitable.”

My low aim. All my life, I’ve read poets and read about poets who lost themselves in their poetic vision, who lost themselves in their words, who skirted the edge of the scariest part of their soul before diving in because they knew that in that terrifying place was a startling truth and their job, their purpose, was to go there. All my life I’d been enchanted by writers whose words were magical, transcendent, suffused with deity. Words that lived long after their death. Poetry that was inevitable.

I asked, “What is your purpose as a poet?” I was not prepared for his answer: “To apprehend God.”

This is the thing inside the best poetry, the thing you can’t put your finger on, the thing that stirs you and gets to you and rings on in your mind after you put the book down and forgotten where it is.

I have always known deity resides at the heart of words. Take any word and sit with it and let it unfold, let it unfurl like a rose, and eventually somewhere way down deep in it is a spark of the divine. It’s why when Michael Sheen reads Dylan Thomas it sends a shiver up your spine. Great writing—prose, drama, essay, but especially poetry—transforms the reader. But before the words are even written down, the poet must transform. The writer must aim to transcend. To leap off the scaffold of their language into the unknown and, maybe, the unknowable.

If you’re not doing that, then why even pick up a pen?

So, I am recalibrating. I’m training my sight beyond the end of the poem. More than likely, I’ll shove everything I write into a drawer or use it to light the grill, but the only way a writer might have that rare moment, that gossamer moment, when deity peeks out of the words, when the unknown and unknowable seems to look over your shoulder as words explode in your mind in a perfect order so fast, so enormous, you can barely hope to capture even a blurry reflection of them. If we hope our words are not what matters to a reader, but instead that the reader is captured, captivated, enchanted by our language’s inherent spirit, the ghost in our poetry, then we have to—I have to—start now by becoming enchanted before I write a single word.

If I can disappear into the words to briefly transcend the stupid, stupid, stupid news cycle we’re all suffering, then maybe, just maybe, whoever reads those words will follow and, briefly, just for a little bit, step into a more beautiful world.

My aim now isn’t at a bullseye, or even a target, or anywhere specific but instead is to not aim at all; my job is to surrender, to be dissolved into language. To transform.

Attorney James Finnegan walked into his office. He stopped at his secretary’s desk. Marge stopped what she was doing and devoted her attention to Finnegan who laid documents on Marge’s desk one at a time.

As he laid each down, Marge date stamped it with an electronic stamp which sent the document index number to her desktop while placing a blue razor-sharp, nine-digit number and date onto the front page.

Each copy was fringed with colored tabs, each tab denoting a mistake, addition, question or revision. Each tab was numbered, the numbers recorded on Finnegan’s desktop and mirrored on Marge’s. Later, Marge would resolve each tab, find it on the desktop and record her resolution.

Finnegan then produced a collection of pink pages, each with a paragraph carefully double-spaced. Finnegan waited until Marge had loaded a blank pink page into her printer then read each paragraph slowly as she typed it into the computer then reprinted her own copy.

Each paragraph was instructions to Marge.

When they finished, they laid the pages side by side, proofed them, signed them and date stamped with the aforementioned machine.

“I’ll be in my office.”

“Of course.”

“Do you think the copy guy is weird?”

“Impeccably so, sir.”

“He seemed to make a joke about my soul.”

“But you don’t have one, sir.”

Finnegan stared briefly. His lips almost pursed. This outpouring of mirth was not lost on Marge.

Perched on the edge of a couch across from them Finnegan’s soul, Sean, from Finnegan’s middle name, was shocked and appalled.

Sean spent a lot of time on that couch. It knew Marge like the back of its hand. It watched her peel sticky notes off of documents every day and could trace the arc her infuriated eyebrows had worn into the space above her desk like a groove in a rock. Sean knew the precise moment Marge would say perfunctorily and with solid precision—

“As if I ever make a mistake,”

--and mouth along with a grin.

Sean knew by the timber of a folder’s slap that it was lunch, and it would follow Marge down to the Cajun joint over on State where she would eat an ungodly amount of crawfish, her fingers and lips greasy with butter and roux, then share her private glee as she paid for each lunch from petty cash, annotating the expenditure as “copies per” in some client’s case.

It was atrociously illegal, against everything she stood for, could get her boss disbarred and was just ferociously wicked. It made the craw daddies taste divine.

Sean rose each morning to wallow in Finnegan through ablutions as regular as sunrise; stare out the window of the morning train, trying to read band flyers and decipher graffiti as Finnegan read briefs; and weather Finnegan’s inglorious routine with Marge where Sean lately found itself a surprised spectator. It used to stay in Finnegan’s office but no more. Sean found Finnegan profoundly fucked up, incomprehensibly neurotic, proactively irritating, a pedantic conversationalist, and a goddamned overtaxing rule-oriented nitpicking jackass.

Until lately, Sean thought it was merely the occulted voice of reason in the conflagration of urgency that was Finnegan’s waking mind. It had since learned it was really a separate being, a governor of sorts, a kind of curator for Finnegan whom Sean was more often referring to lately with exaggerated, nearly British disdain as ‘Shitbag’.

One day Sean just said, ‘fuck it’, threw its spectral hands in the air and walked off the job.

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You’re in a movie.

You’re driving down Hollywood Boulevard in 1948. Everything is silver and shadow; everything is concrete and ink. You’re following a beat-up rickshaw. It’s plastered with stickers. It’s got a cracked turn signal and a rusty license plate.

People spill into the street through gaps between great hulking Packards and Fords parked at the curb. They’re a riot of styles: Women in wide-collared pants suits with bug-eye shades; men in checkered sport coats over wide bottom slacks. An undulating ocean of fedoras.

Behind it all rise the classic facades of film noir, gray as tombstones: The Bradley, the New York Public Library, The Drake Hotel from Chicago, the Los Angeles Police Department, the San Francisco Funicular. Squeezed between those iconic structures: record shops, coffee shops, diners, barbers, shoe stores. Neon signs, globe lights, striped awnings, a giant neon vertical “Chicago” marquee blinking dimly in the darkening shadows of the setting sun.

The rickshaw stops.

Push through the glass, past a passenger in a pale suit, past the rickshaw runner in his dirty white shirt and pants, his dirty captain’s cap, his sweat-stained neckerchief, to the street and the reason he’s stopped. A crowd has piled off the sidewalks into traffic, an excited gang of paparazzi and tourists with their cameras pointed at Marilyn Monroe with her white dress floating up around her hips as she stands over a ventilation grate. The rickshaw driver jerks his carriage around the crowd.

His passenger: middle-aged, Chinese, brown camel hair coat over a tan shirt and a brown tie, legs crossed, writing carefully, laboriously in a notebook balanced on his knee. A small hardback reporter’s journal flipped open. Dead center of the page, a grid of Chinese block characters. The passenger carefully tears the page out. The man folds the page, slips it into his coat pocket. He snaps the notebook closed. Glimpse of a heavy badge is clipped to the cover.

The rickshaw stops again. The driver is sweating to beat hell. His uniform is the impossibly heavy white denim worn by Charlie Allnut, captain in The African Queen, the same uniform worn by every rickshaw driver on set. He looks up, trying to catch his breath, using his neckerchief to wipe his glistening face as a gaggle of Extras pile up around their gesticulating guide who is walking them through orientation.

“You’re in a movie,” They murmur and whisper. The guide drops into his script: “This place,” throwing his arms wide to take everything in. “was built by the Brothers Hang as a virtual set for a film noir game abandoned in development. It was carved out of historic three-flats and brownstones from Chicago’s Brickyard neighborhood. They spent billions turning their purchase into a perfect period replica of an American metropolitan city as it would have existed between 1939 to 1958—the classic Film Noir period. When investors pulled out, the Brothers Hang just walked away. The place filled up with squatters and noir punks, then cosplayers started running scenes, shooting frame for frame remakes of classic noir. The Brothers Hang realized they’d accidentally built a theme park for film freaks and retooled the whole joint into what you’re seeing now. Welcome,” he looks around majestically. From somewhere, music swells. “. . . to Circa.”

“Hey look, it’s a Humphrey Bogart!”

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Please click through to Mr. Bull (no relation) and dig my short story, “F.M.”

Click these words.

Danka

—Bull

Over the last eight years I’ve stared into the news with growing dread, with disbelief, and with the naivety that’s baked into my privilege. I’ve grown bitter. I’m cranky—but I’m not yet angry. Not enough. Not enough to get off my ass and risk rubber bullets to add my croaky old rasp to the millions. But I should. So many of us should.

I grew up in America’s most recent rising arc of wealth and am writing this now from the comfort of my robot chair in a nice little brick number on the far north side of Chicago listening to the whisper of the wind through the oaks and sycamores adorning my quiet neighborhood. My kids are struggling because the economy is kicking their ass, because their city burned down, and because their hope was eroded to a nub. And when I say my kids, I mean my son, my daughter, my nephews, nieces, friends, mentees, associates, and fellows whose generation is lettered. Two whole generations and the one coming up are constantly anxious because the the only America they’ve ever known is still on fire, still run by old rich white dudes, still riddled with nazis, and going increasingly insane. We educated them well enough so it ain’t hard for them to do the math and non of their dreams add up to dick. They are checking out right and left, not just out of careers and home ownership and parenthood, but out of life in some cases.

It’s like we’re all in a Steinbeck Novel

And if you’ve read Grapes of Wrath, (or any Steinbeck) then you know it ends in baffling weirdness haunted by a desiccated spirit of endurance that some MFA students mistakenly refer to as ‘finding hope in one another’. They’re wrong. That was not hope. It was grit. By the time the tractors rolled over their fields, they’d been starved to death, shot, battered, and reviled. The rest of the book is just them going on1. When Tom Joad picks up that tortoise it is the end of his story, not the opening line.

And you must forgive me for employing a platitude, but

Hope is a verb. Hope is effort. Hope is action. If you don’t believe me, then read Nick Cave’s extraordinary quote, from his moving and ceaselessly remarkable newsletter, “The Red Hand Files”:

Hopefulness is not a neutral position. It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism. Each redemptive or loving act, as small as you like – such as reading to your little boy... keeps the Devil down in the hole.

But hope sometimes requires a reboot. Not for an individual; but for a nation. Our national hope ebbs and flows according to a galaxy of unreliable stars, but there is an occasional flare that reignites us all.

For your edification, a brief list of recent heroes.

In my adult lifetime, I have witnessed a number of people step into the public glare to light us all on fire. Obama comes to mind. Martin Luther King. But there are other people, smaller figures, not public figures, not at first, who made a decision, a small act, that changed everything. People like Ruby Bridges, Jeannette Rankin, Phillip Randolph, Margaret Chase Smith, Shirley Chisholm, Cesar Chavez and more. What they have in common is a built-in don’t-give-a-fuck-gene wrapped around a do-the-right-thing gene. Each of the achieved something that matters to all of us because they decided doing the right thing meant more than the pain of ridicule, injury, or loss of reputation.

The other thing they have in common is their action affected people. Their action rippled out past their community and buoyed the spirits of thousands of people, lifting them up just enough to catch a new scent on the breeze, to snatch a spark from the radio, the TV, or just a conversation that reignited their hope, and inspired them to act right.

We could use one of them now.

We need an individual, or a small fist of friends, to act in such a way that their actions defy the staggering avalanche of rights and laws. Someone to act in such a way that they inspire everyone to remember this simple fucking truth: we’re all on the same side.

It’s not democrats-vs-republicans (except in congress where it should be); it’s not conservative-vs-progressives, christians-vs-non-christians, god-fearers-vs-atheists, black-vs-white, white-vs-nonwhites, or the Bears-vs-the Packers.2 It’s the people who want control-vs-the people they want to control and in the story of America, that means the ultra-rich-vs-us. You may not believe me, you may be rolling your eyes at my emotional libtard snowflake naivety but while you do, some billionaire is ripping the social fabric out form under your feet. And mine.

No argument can heal this divide

So please release your white-knuckle grip on a logical, well-informed, fact-based debate with your opponents. We’re beyond that. We’re in the inarticulate red-faced fury of the decline of American civility. We don’t need a logic problem. We need a symbol. We need a hero.

Even as recently as Obama’s race for second term, the media landscape field of battle for our constant attention was far less layered than it is today. It seems to get more fractured every year, which 3000 years from now, may seem like a bullet point in a footnote from a scat half page about the 2020s, but we live in it and the points of focus are multiplying like a measles outbreak. How does a hero rise up out of this maelstrom of glurge and get everyone—and I mean everyone—to hold hands in the street and turn our furious regard toward the people fucking it all up for the rest of us? Well,

Maybe it is us.

I know that statement has a whole navaho-wind-catcher full of new age vibes and feel good hippie bullshit in it. It sounds like something Barney would say. It sounds stupid. But it isn’t. Hear me out.

I don’t know where the next hero’s gonna come from, but

I know how we can take a step toward fixing this shit and inspire millions and millions of people to maybe, perhaps, quit being such monolithic dickwardian choads and, instead, work together. I’m sure as hell not the first guy to say this, I mean Kurt Vonnegut and John Lennon tried to tell us how this works. Jesus put his hand up. It’s in all the church books, somewhere, and it’s so fucking simple but it’s so fucking hard because, the whole of reality is pissing me off every minute of every day. Look, take a deep breath, maybe stop reading to hydrate, maybe do a breathing exercise because

You’re going to hate this:

Just be kind. It’s so easy. But dude, that means you too, Democrat and you too, Liberal Progressive. Having the moral upper hand and being on the right side of history doesn’t give you the right to be a dick. Angry, yes, of course. But an asshole? No, Lorraine. No.

Virtues only exist when you have to use them.

And employing a virtue—being prudent, being temperate, having fortitude, acting justly—is not signaling virtue. It is the virtue. They are verbs, like hope. And, like Saint Cave said above, …each redemptive or loving act, as small as you like… keeps the devil down in the hole.

You have to ask yourself: what are we fighting for? For me, I’m fighting for the ideals expressed in our constitution, the rule of law, and the civility they imply. I want all the warring sides to work together, or at least to recognize we’re both on the same team: one side is offense, one side is defense.3 Same jersey. Same stupid mascot. But good lord, how do you roll back the incivility? How do you reduce the tension, the anger, the heat in the local universe? Where is the action plan for the individual trying to light their own small candle of hope?

Actually, I do have a plan.

It’s pretty easy. I’m calling it microheroics and it follows the truth given to us by Saint Cave: do one small act of kindness every time you get the chance. You may think how the fuck is that heroic, but believe me, heroism has no scale. And in a world that is increasingly mean, even waving to your neighbor, even smiling, is heroic. I’ll prove it to you.

For those of you who drive: the

next time some motherfucker in a Mazda is sneaking up on your right to snake in front of instead of waiting their turn like everybody else? Let them in. The next time you’re on your way into the grocery store and pass someone taking the last thing out of their cart? Take it back for them. The next time you’re at a meet-up and you spy someone who is clearly new and suffering under the crushing weight of introducing themselves and making small talk, walk over and introduce yourself and make small talk then introduce them to someone else and use one of the things you learned about them. Next time you go into the kitchen, take your roommate’s crusty ass cereal bowl along with a wink and say I got you, Roomy. Even smaller, even more micro, the next time you’re with your crew and you sense that Z Dawg is churning internally, just lean up against him and don’t even say anything. Just offer that shoulder. Jesus Have Mercy Christ,

The effect of these small, simple, actions is HUGE

and far reaching. And yes, they are heroic because there is a threshold you must cross in every instance. It may be razor thin, but it’s there and many times—many many times—each of us has decided not to step over it.

But do you recall when you were the guy in the Mazda? When someone returned your shopping cart? When someone took you under their wing? When was the last time someone took your dishes to the sink? When was the last time someone offered you the simple warmth of their existence while you churned?

And I know what I’m proposing, what I’m asking of you, is much bigger than it looks on paper. But I’m asking. Try, just once a week, once a month, try to do the smallest thing, the tiniest help, the most microscopic heroic act. I have said how it affects others, but bro, it affects you more. You will, as you do it more, develop a low key hunger for being nice, for being kind, for being simply helpful—you will develop a taste for heroism. You will, even after one or two times, rekindle hope.

The fire will be small, but…it’s still fire.

And maybe if enough of us do this, if enough of us grow the glow of our hope it will join with someone else’s dim, faint halo and another and another until all those flickering flames will become a bigger fire and maybe, just maybe, we all become the hero we all need.

Maybe.

—Bull

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